“Our life stories are not wholly love stories”: Redefining Romance and Spinsterhood in Winifred Holtby’s Interwar Novel South Riding

Abstract

This thesis analyses the defence of spinsterhood in Winifred Holtby’s novel South Riding: An English Landscape (1936) in connection to its criticism of interwar popular romance fiction that prioritised marriage for women. During the 1930s, the reassertion of traditional gender roles, the shifting attention of feminism away from spinsterhood and the emergence of new theories within psychology and sexology on the negative psychological influence of spinsterhood complicated the spinster’s position within society. As a result, these women were stereotypically presented as anomalous, mentally thwarted and marginal figures within literature. Particularly, popular romance fiction that emerged during the 1930s overtly focused on marriage for women and subsequently perpetuated the negative discourse around spinsters. Despite the significant critical engagement with elements of romance in South Riding, the influence of the popular romance genre has been largely neglected in previous research on the novel. Until now, literary scholars have mainly placed Holtby within the context of middlebrow fiction and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), ignoring her novel’s immediate intertextual and social relationship with the burgeoning popular romance novel of the 1930s and its influence, of which Holtby herself was highly aware. This thesis therefore analyses Holtby’s engagement with popular romance fiction in South Riding and argues that as a feminist, writer and reformer Holtby challenges the stereotypical portrayal of spinsterhood in interwar literature by subverting its conventions. In this manner, Holtby foregrounds that “[o]ur life stories are not wholly love stories”, undermining the importance of the popular romance narrative that prioritises marriage and pathologizes spinsters.